As He Himself Puts It: The Art of Quoting”

 “As He Himself Puts It: The Art of Quoting.”  In your timed essay later this week, you will be asked to use at least one well-integratedquotation from one of the five essays we’ve read in NWR. “Well-integrated” means—as the authors of TSIS, Graff and Birkenstein, suggest—that the quotation, the “‘they say,’” is clearly “connected with what you say” (43, emphasis theirs).  There are two ways to make sure of “this sort of integration,” according to Graff and Birkenstein: “(1) by choosing quotations wisely, with an eye to how well they support a particular part of your text, and (2) by surrounding every major quotation with a frame, explaining whose words they are, what the quotation means, and how the quotation relates to your own text” (43).

I asked you this week to pick out a quotation from our reading that you will use in your timed essay. Here, in this discussion topic, I want you to practice the art of quoting—to give your quotation a “frame” that shows its relevance to your topic. Here’s what to do:

1. So first, imagine that you will be writing on one of the five main topics gleaned from our readings:

• eating disorders/the effect of the media
• the power of a name/the corrosive effects of assimilation
• language used to manipulate us, during wartime and/or in other compelling circumstances
• the effects of globalization
• the rich, the poor, the middle class: the status and effect of economic class in the U.S.A.

2. Next, decide what you might want to say about that topic—where you’d enter (from what point of view, from what concrete detail that helps you expand on it) and what kind of claim you might make about it.

3. Then pick a quotation that either helps support or illustrate something related to your claim about the topic or gives you a good way of entering into your topic.

4. Finally, using a template from Chapter 3 of TSIS, make what Graff and Berkenstein call a “’quotation sandwich,’ with the statement introducing [the quotation] serving as the top slice of bread and the explanation following it serving as the bottom slice” (46).  I suggest looking at the difference between the two paragraphs about Susan Bordo that are given in this chapter as examples of using a quotation without integrating it and then, in the revised paragraph, using precise language and giving good background for really framing the quotation well so that we can see why and how it’s relevant.

(>>Notice how they call Susan Bordo simply “Bordo” after the first time they introduce her name. This is how authors are commonly referred to in academic writing.)